There is a World-wide trend in both developed and developing countries for increasing coffee consumption. The European styles of serving coffee with milk are by far the most popular—in particular, caffe latte, cappuccino and flat white coffee It is more time-consuming to produce the European styles of coffee as the milk has to be heated with the infusion of steam to create a frothiness or foam which is an essential component for the overall taste, mouth-feel and appearance of the coffee style.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,800,805 discloses a typical espresso machine with a steam probe that may be telescoped and also includes air intake to mix air and steam into the milk. Because the current manual process of steaming the milk is operator-dependent, there can be a wide variation of temperature, taste and appearance of the coffee style.
To save time and reduce dependence on a barista, machines with automatic milk frothers have been proposed
U.S. Pat. No. 5,611,262 discloses a dispenser for frothed milk. The milk is frothed by mixing with air and avoids the need for a barista to use steam.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,183,800 (Sarah Lee) similarly addresses the problem of avoiding the time taken by a barista by using a frother in the machine to dispense frothed milk. These proposals are not acceptable for restaurant standard coffee.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,901,848 proposes an automatic milk frother that senses the temperature of the milk and has a controller that enables combinations of steam and air to be provided for predetermined periods of time to produce varying frother results. The barista simply holds the milk jug in place until the pre-set cycle is finished. This proposal does not reduce the baristas work load or improve the barista's productivity.
It is an object of this invention to ameliorate the shortcomings of the prior art and provide means to make high quality espresso milk while improving the Barista's productivity.